What Causes Cancer? It’s Complicated
The Wall Street Journal | Arthur W. Lambert
For glyphosate, the scientific evidence is decidedly mixed. A direct link to cancer is still debatable, but even if one accepts the high end of the reported risks the effects are, at best, modest. The upper estimate (relative risk of 1.3 to 1.4) is an order of magnitude lower than the risk associated with heavy smoking (relative risk 15 to 30). To put it another way, the risk associated with glyphosate falls somewhere between the small hazard that comes from eating a considerable amount of bacon (for colorectal cancer) and consuming very hot tea (for esophageal cancer).
Either directly or indirectly, many carcinogens lead to DNA damage, which is the underlying cause of cancer. Assuming glyphosate could have inflicted some genetic damage, it would still be difficult to say with any certainty that it actually caused a cancer because an untold number of additional steps stand between an exposure to carcinogenic agents and the diagnosed disease—a long and tortuous road that stretches from the initially damaged cell to a resulting cancer.